Superstar Melbourne chef Rosheen Kaul has officially left her post as head chef at Brunswick East restaurant Etta. Kaul, who joined the Lygon Street restaurant as head chef in 2021, worked her final shift in the Etta kitchen on Saturday April 27.

Kaul is taking a break from restaurant life to finish her second cookbook, a follow-up to the James Beard Award-winning Chinese-ish, which she co-authored with illustrator Joanna Hu.

Owner Hannah Green opened Etta in a former fish’n’chip shop just over seven years ago and will continue to operate the restaurant as usual. New head chef Lorcán Kan will serve his first Etta menu on Tuesday July 2.

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For now, the kitchen will continue to use Kaul’s recipes, which draw influence from her childhood spent in Singapore and benefit from her Melbourne restaurant experience. This includes an apprenticeship at Lee Ho Fook, a six-month stint at Ezard, four years at Dinner By Heston, where she worked her way up to chef de partie, and a role at Carlton Wine Room that was cut short when Melbourne first went into lockdown in 2020.

Notable dishes Kaul became known for at Etta include the restaurant’s now-signature crisp and tangy red curry rice salad with grilled calamari and woodfired otak-otak (fish cakes), a fried quail egg, padrón pepper and curry leaf oil skewer, and gorgeous desserts that often used fresh fruits and granitas.

When Etta owner Hannah Green first offered Kaul the head chef role at the end of 2020, the chef was reluctant to take it. “I didn’t feel that I had the full skill set that I wanted when I got to this point,” Kaul told Broadsheet back in 2021. “I wanted to be able to do all different kinds of butchery. I wanted to have already been a sous chef, to have run a smaller team already. I wanted to be really prepared.”

But Green convinced Kaul to take the leap and the two consistently delivered an exceptional restaurant experience.